Virtual machine technology can be used to package up a workload and move it in a datacenter. This ability to move a workload from one physical host to another is a tremendous benefit for users because it allows for dynamic machine consolidation which leads to much lower hardware and administrative costs. Virtual machines typically access storage through a module that handles storage virtualization located within a hypervisor, a management partition or a combination thereof. In this model virtual machines typically send storage I/O requests to the module via a software communication path such as an inter-partition communication bus like the example partition bus described in U.S. application Ser. No. 11/128,647 entitled “Partition Bus,” the contents of which are herein incorporated by reference in their entirety. Communicating between the virtual machine and the hypervisor (or management partition) incurs a CPU cycle cost due to running the communication path and any context switches that may occur when transporting messages. Accordingly, techniques for increasing the efficiency of handling I/O requests by decreasing CPU costs are desirable.